The late Christopher Hitchens once published an essay in Vanity Fair called Why Women Aren’t Funny. Inspired by a medical study into the differences in humour between the sexes, Hitchens asked whether you had ever heard a man talking about his girlfriend by saying: “Man, does she ever make ’em laugh.” Women praise their boyfriends’ humour all the time, he pointed out.

Hitchens explained that this was because men need to be funny, since “the chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex”. Women, on the other hand, “have no corresponding need to appeal in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.” Women being beautiful and sexy at all times.

It’s a pity Hitchens never got to see Lena Dunham’s sitcom Girls, which returns this month on Sky Atlantic. The series, which centres on four twentysomething women working their way through unpaid internships and degrading sexual encounters in Brooklyn, also works as a demolition of Hitchens’s argument. Mainly because it is so funny, you will dislocate your balls laughing at it.

Since Girls is written by a woman and stars women, it is generally assumed that men will find nothing of interest in it. One female blogger in New York called it “FUBU” — for us, by us. Men tend to despise Sex and the City and as the New York Post’s critic wrote, Girls is “Sex and the City for ugly people”. So it doesn’t even have the consolation of Sarah Jessica Parker’s pretty face and attractive personality.

That was sarcasm, by the way. I hate Sex and the City with a passion. It has nothing to do with the fact that SATC is about “strong” women, and more to do with the fact that it is a vapid celebration of materialism and has all the realism of SpongeBob SquarePants.

But I love Girls. As I discovered when I caught the pilot episode on a flight to New York, I also love Lena Dunham’s character, the wannabe essayist Hannah, and I can’t quite decide whether this is because I find her funny or attractive. It’s partly a FUBU thing. London and New York have plenty in common, and I’d guess Hackney (where I live) is a bit like Green Point in Brooklyn. That world of hipster coffee and low-paid arts jobs is queasily familiar — as is that generational sense of insecurity and lack of purpose.

The loudest Girls h8ers criticise the smallness of this world, highlighting the fact that the four actresses all have famous parents (Zosia Mamet, who plays the naïve Sex and the City obsessive Shoshanna, is the daughter of playwright David Mamet). Others point out that the show doesn’t reflect the racial variety of New York — though I’d counter that no one loved The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air less for its lack of white faces. Besides, Dunham is wise to these accusations — Hannah’s parents constantly call her “over-entitled”, even as she trudges through a year’s unpaid internship.

Critics have also made much of the grimness — notably the scene where Hannah is asked to lay face down by her porn-obsessed boyfriend Adam, and then squeaks that she would prefer if he didn’t stick his cock in that hole.

In fact Dunham seems intent on filming herself in as many humiliating scenarios as possible, exposing her rolls of fat or whipping off her T-shirt to text Adam a picture of her tits. Dunham once related the time that a “successful comedy writer” gave her notes on the pilot. “I don’t want to see girls going to the fuckin’ bathroom together,” he said. “I wanna see girls making out!” Which says much about why Girls was necessary.

To return to Hitchens (who admitted in his essay that he saw woman as there to be made out with), his case rests on his postulation that, for men, life is inherently unfair, which is why humour is part of their “armour-plate” against life. “Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is. Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province.”

Girls is pretty much exclusively about what a sordid mess life is. Dunham can clearly think of little funnier than calamitous visits to the doctor. There is at least one episode that makes the link between sexual frustration and furry domestic animals too, though that was the one where Adam dressed his penis up in a fur coat. (Adam is one of the best male comic characters ever, by the way.)

Above all, it is about making mistakes and trying to learn from them, about growing up, trying to find your voice in an unfair world. It’s not really about the female condition. It’s about the human condition. Thankfully, men don’t have a monopoly on that any more.